While everyone is busy talking and worrying about these intentionally symbolic US sanctions against Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, there is a real news story happening in Venezuela that is getting little play. The Caracas Metro is tripling its fares, from 0.50 bolivars to 1 bolivar in June and 1.50 in December. Meanwhile, a friend who takes language classes at a Bolivarian University, President Hugo Chavez’s new public university system, tells me that the university abruptly announced it would start charging tuition. Retroactively.

Now, I neither have a strong opinion about these fee hikes, nor do I feel I have much of a right to an opinion — this is the definition of an internal matter. However, I think it’s worth pointing out that the biggest Venezuelan public subsidy is to motor fuel. It’s hard to quantify exactly, but if you take PDVSA at their word that they sell 442,000 barrels a day of gasoline and diesel to the internal market for an average of about $7.21 a barrel, that’s currently an effective subsidy of about $110 a barrel, or $48 million a day, or $18 billion a year. Each year, that money could buy about a dozen new entire Metro lines (at least if they were the economical kind, rather than the gold-plated stuff pushed by gringo export-pushers in the 1970s). And language tutors for all.

So remember how yesterday morning Quasecarioca told us about Brazil’s new forestry law, and how people are cutting trees like mad in hopes that the law will contain an amnesty provision? Well now, someone has killed a couple in Brazil and removed an ear from each corpse. It happens to be that one of the members of the couple was a prominent forest activist. Could this relate to the debate? It’s hard to rule it out.

An Amazon environmental activist and his wife were killed late on Monday and the crime is being investigated as a possible assassination to silence the outspoken forest defender, according to police.

José Claudio Ribeiro da Silva, also known by his nickname of “Ze Claudio,” was shot and killed along with his wife, Maria do Espírito Santo da Silva, in Nova Ipixuna, a rural town of 15,000 people in the northeast Brazilian Amazon state of Para, about 40km from the nearest city, Maraba.

Exact details and circumstances of the death are not yet clear. However, Felicio Pontes a federal prosecutor in Para state, as well as Marcos Augusto Cruz, the local civil police investigator, told Al Jazeera by phone late on Tuesday that the killings have all the signs of a cold-blooded murder for hire.

“We are working on a hypothesis that this was an execution because the shooters cut off one ear of each of the victims,” Cruz told Al Jazeera.

“Usually this is done as proof to give back to whoever ordered the killings,” Cruz told Al Jazeera, before adding that is was likely he was killed in retaliation for speaking out against illegal loggers.

Ribeiro was a community leader of a rural Amazon sustainable reserve that produces nuts and natural oils native to the forest.

In Venezuela, the oil minister and foreign minister are on live TV on all broadcast and domestic cable channels talking about the US’s sanctions against PDVSA. They are “rejecting” the measures as “illegal” and calling for workers to “mobilize in defense of our oil industry.” But when pressed by reporters for information about the specifics of what they’ll do in response, they are holding back. They say they are going to study the effects of the sanctions. Ramirez declined to comment on whether Venezuela actually sent fuel to Iran. He said Venezuela is committed to maintaining oil shipments to Citgo. He said PDVSA would consider cutting sales to Hovensa (a big refinery in the Virgin Islands, jointly owned with Hess) and other US customers that weren’t part of PDVSA.

The short of it is this. I think most people in the Venezuelan government know that these sanctions are just theater, and that they are more about shutting up Connie Mack than about shutting down PDVSA. But they can’t look weak before their public in an issue of national sovereignty, so they are going to huff and puff until they can find an excuse to move on to the next thing and forget all about this. They are responding to hot-air sanctions with a hot-air press conference. If only life could always be so simple. Continue reading →

The US Secretary of State decided to impose the following sanctions on Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA in response to shipments of fuel to Iran, according to a US government official briefed on the matter. These are the mandatory sanctions required by the US law that imposed sanctions on Iran in an effort to get Iran to halt any possible nuclear weapons program. The sanctions imposed on PDVSA (not on Venezuela’s government, mind you) are:

– A prohibition on US government procurement contracts (just PDVSA, not subsidiaries such as Citgo)

– A ban on new export licenses (existing licenses will be respected)

– A ban on Export Import (Exim) Bank financing (not very important, as Exim Bank stopped lending to Venezuela before the PDVSA strike and lockout in 2003)

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Why I’m here

I'm Steven Bodzin, a reporter and investigator. I have lived in Chile, Venezuela, and Canada, and am now working at REDD Intelligence in New York. You can see my paid work here. I continue to follow South America and I'm especially interested in corruption in the energy industry. Here, I share some of the sights, experiences and half-baked thoughts that I am not sure I'll ever get paid to publish, or little leads that might help attract new sources. If you know more about any of these stories, please share. You can contact me at settysoutham@gmail.com.